Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced union flag street parties, brown-skinned people are made to show their loyalty by eating red-, white- and blue-coloured Battenberg cakes until they explode. And what is that acrid smell of burnt fur now polluting Britain’s hitherto gloriously carbon-free air? Why it is all the kittens that Nigel Farage and his evil henchmen are tossing on to beacons from John O’Groats to Land’s End in order to demonstrate that Ukip are the masters now.
– James Delingpole. You don’t have to be a UKIP fan (I am not) to be unimpressed by the tendentious nature of the Channel Four spoof documentary that Delingpole writes about here. Meanwhile, JD imagines what a spoof on the Greens would be like. In reality, the chances of Channel Four, a fairly leftist news channel, doing some sort of job on the Green Party is remote, but it should, given the fluorescent idiocy, authoritarianism and often just sheer ugliness of what that outfit wants to do in practice. See its latest manifesto.
I am a UKIP fan and will be voting for them in the GE. They’re not perfect, but compared to the others…
Who will you be voting for?
Channel 5 actually have done a spoof of the Greens.
Whilst we can speculate what a Kipper state might resemble, there’s no shortage of real-world leftist examples from history or the present day. This was a good effort but E.A.Blair it aint.
Not exactly a UKIP fan, but if nothing else they are a useful tool for hitting the establishment parties over the head with. The more they squeal, the more attractive UKIP look.
In the longer term it’s difficult to see how you can make an alliance between natural Labour supporters and natural Tory supporters. Apart from the fact that they have both been abandoned by their parties there are only a few areas of agreement*. Also it’s not really clear that Farage has what it takes to lead a serious party.
*Both groups are moderate nationalists and tend to be fairly socially conservative, but probably disagree on almost everything else.
I watched it out of interest to see how desperate the leftist MSM has become in their attempt to discredit UKIP in any way shape or form. It was billed as a dramaticized documentary. A blatant lie then. It was pure fiction and feeble and febrile fiction at that.
The best thing about UKIP, apart from their promise to get UK out of the EU, is that they frighten the horses. Boy are they frightening the horses if this lash up is anything to go by.
It would not matter if C4 was funded voluntarily and if there were non leftist television stations (making shows mocking the Greens and Labour and so on) to choose from.
But ALL the British television and radio stations are leftist (the regulations make them show) and C4 is funded, in part, by a levy on the commercial companies.
It is just awful – totally pathetic.
” it’s difficult to see how you can make an alliance between natural Labour supporters and natural Tory supporters.”
Voters is a different thing from supporters is a different thing from members. People will vote for a party because they consider they best represent their interests in the simple sense they score +4 -3 =3 as opposed to -3 +4 =3 on the matters concern them. If UKIP receives a +5 -2 =2 on those issues there’s no reason why voters & even ex-supporters can’t cohabitate.
It’s the mistake of seeing voters or supporters as a uniform, ideological block. A mistake a contributor to this site regularly makes about the EDL. If an issue’s important to you, you may gravitate towards those sharing that view, irrespective of what other views they hold, if they’re the only ones you see sharing it. What else can you do?
Of course, the above implies UKIP supporters, themselves, are not a block. No doubt some of them are just fashion victims jumpng on a popular trend. The GE may clarify.
“…fluorescent idiocy…”?
Please, it’s an “established” political party.
That’s “Florescent Idiocracy” to you sir!
Paul,
You reckon C4 is private. It is or was 50% state owned. It is the BBC with adverts. It largely makes utter drivel. Total tripe. Recall utter shite like Brookside or Big Brother?
Channel 4 is a public corporation under the Broadcasting Act 1990 (the dog days of Mrs Thatcher/dawn of the Major era), i.e. it is a State established company rather than being simply a private company whose shares are state-owned, (I believe Ted Heath privatised Thomas Cook and 3 pubs in Carlisle). The UK State used to own Travel Agencies (Lunn Poly as well as Thomas Cook into the 1970s), as it had been owned by the Railway Companies at nationalisation.
How very East German it all is and was.
I think the point BIS was making (notwithstanding the, shall we say, non-standard mathematics) is that if the totality of a party’s positions best aligns with an individual voter’s policy preferences he will vote for it. That’s nice in theory but I don’t think it translates into actual practice, and certainly not in the US. Sometimes there is an issue or two which is of superior, if not overwhelming, importance to the voter, and it will outweigh a host of lesser issues. I’ve seen that all too often in our elections, where people will agree with 90% of the libertarian positions but because of disagreement over one or two issues (say, abortion or foreign policy) won’t vote for its candidates (even in races where the winner will never be called upon to vote on that particular issue).
Of course, that is clearly affected by our two-party system, where the “wasted vote” argument always comes up (a vote for a third party candidate is considered to be a de facto vote for the inferior of the two major parties, a fear most people simply can’t get past), which isn’t as much a factor in UK politics. But I think the point still holds. Thus it seems to me that AKM’s comment that “it’s difficult to see how you can make an alliance between natural Labour supporters and natural Tory supporters” is accurate. There are one or two “big issues” for each of those groups which are antithetical to the positions of the other, and which I suspect will outweigh any commonalities on lesser issues. Time will tell.
The front page of this evening’s Evening Standard is a case in point: a big pic of a grinning Farage standing outside a pub with one of the Chelsea fans accused of racism on the Paris metro the other night. No context of course, just another not-so-subtle attempt to paint UKIP as beyond the pale.
What has happened to London newspapers? They make the Daily Mirror look like a model of centrism and rationality.
James, at least they have to give them away. Isn’t the Standard owned by an ex-KGB officer and his family? To be fair, all the other media seem to have found the picture too.
Wasn’t the Chelsea supporter a city banker, like Farage? Seeing as Nige is one of the few candidates who has had a real world job in the past, it is unlikely other members will get caught out like that?
@ Laird
It wasn’t intended to be mathematics.
+4 -3 =3
A party where the voter approves on 4 policies, disapproves on 3 & is equivocal on 3. (Usually equivocal because both/all parties share the same policy so he takes it for granted his opinion doesn’t matter)
The +5 -2 =2 notional score for UKIP to indicate that they’re both offering more things he does like & less of the things he doesn’t but also taking issues out of the party consensus area & running with them. Finest example’s immigration, been a don’t touch area for a couple generations. And it’s areas like this frustrated Tory & Labour voters are finding common ground
Well, I still don’t understand the non-math, but I stand by my earlier comment.
@ Laird
Well you might take “that bigoted woman” Mrs Duffy at the last GE. She got short shrift on her views on immigration from Gormless Gordon but she’s hardly likely to have taken her dissatisfaction to the Tories because she wouldn’t have done any better there. With UKIP in the field she may well start regarding the policies shared by UKIP & the Tories, which she disapproves of, as less contentious simply because they’re not unique to the Tories.
I do think voters are quite used to the parties they vote for as being much of a curate’s egg. The white working class are no keener on some of the Labour progressiveness than whatever Tory voters are relish all of the Tory menu. So they hold their nose & concentrate on what affects them. And UKIP’s offering things to concentrate on.
I tend to agree with BiS on that: if enough ‘stand out’ issues get their boxes ticked, UKIP can steal both Labour and Tory votes even if they are not keen on the whole package. UKIP actually *is* a bit different, rather than the Tory Blairism that prevails today.
Laird, I think B-i-S’s point is that in choosing who to vote for, if you bother, it’s not unlike going to a restaurant. There are some dishes diners find unpalatable and so they avoid them regardless of cost or other considerations and are left with choices which might not be what they would ideally like, but they are nonetheless what is on offer and you don’t get a chef’s special from your vote, so they choose whatever is the least awful option. The maths simply shows that the utility of voting is not a mathematical choice, but simply as assessment of what you want from what is on offer, the highest net positive = 1 vote (or 10 for postal voters here).
I do think the restaurant analogy’s rather a good one, MrEd. It’s what we do for lunch, isn’t it? There’s no restaurant that serves exactly what we want so we eat in the one does a decent pork chop & suffer the greasy chips. Has to better than the vegetarian felafel & brown rice, next door. Although their yoghurt’s quite good. Hey look! There’s a McDonalds just opened.